“The Catastrophe” - Part 1: What the End of Bronze-Age Civilization Means for Modern Times

Introduction to Part I: Modern people assume the immunity
of their situation to major disturbance or – even more unthinkable – to
terminal wreckage. The continuance of a society or culture depends, in part, on
that very assumption because without it no one would complete his daily
round. A man cannot enthusiastically arise from bed as the sun comes up
and set about the day’s errands believing that all undertakings will issue
vainly because the established order threatens to go up in smoke before twilight. Just as it serves this necessity, however, the assumption of social permanence,
that tomorrow will necessarily be just like today, can, when it becomes too
habitual through lack of reflection, lead to dangerous complacency.

It is healthy, therefore, to think in an informed way about
the possibility that our society might break down completely and become
unrecognizable. Such things are more than mere possibility – they have
happened. Societies – and, it is fair to say, whole standing civilizations
– have disintegrated swiftly, leaving behind them depopulation and material
poverty. In the two parts of the present essay, I wish to look into one of the
best documented of these epochal events, one that brought abrupt death and
destruction to a host of thriving societies, none of which survived the
scourge. I have divided my essay into two parts, each part further
divided into four subsections.

I. Archeologists, historians, and
classicists call it “the Catastrophe.” It happened more than three thousand
years ago in the lands surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean. Neither geological nor
climatological but rather sociological in character, this chaotic enormity erased civilization in a wide swath of
geography stretching from the western portions of Greece east to the inner
fastnesses of Anatolia, and all the way to Mesopotamia; it turned south as
well, overrunning many islands, finally swamping the borders of Egypt. It left cities in smoking ruin, their
wealth plundered; it plunged the affected regions into a Dark Age, bereft of
literacy, during which populations drastically shrank while the level of
material culture reverted to that of a Stone Age village. Echoes of the event – or complicated
network of linked events – turn up in myth and find reflection in early Greek literature. The Trojan War appears to be implicated
in this event, as do certain episodes of the Old Testament. Recovered records hint at this massive
upheaval: diplomatic letters dictated by Hittite kings and tablets bearing
military orders from the last days of the Mycenaean palace-citadels. Places like Sicily and Sardinia took
their names in the direct aftermath of the Catastrophe.

A
distant but still piquant awareness of the Catastrophe’s effects inspired one
of the earliest theories of history.
In his Works and Days,
mostly consisting of common sense advice to the humble peasant farmers of
Boeotia, the Eighth Century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod declared that humanity could
count five phases. The first three
belong clearly to myth, but the fourth and the fifth boast a more realistic or
historical character in the poet’s description. The fourth men, Hesiod says, generated the heroes whose
deeds the riveting lays of the Trojan War enshrine, but the war itself amounted
to the last, lusty cry of a warrior caste that, while pouring blood and
treasure into a ten-year siege, ignored sinister developments back home. The prolonged absence of the
baron-kings in their enterprise of glory led to a domestic power vacuum. The Greek adventurers would pay dearly
for the costly vanity of their Asian victory. In Hugh Evelyn-White’s translation of Hesiod: “Grim war and
dread battle destroyed a part of [the heroes], some in the land of Cadmus at
seven-gated Thebes when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when
it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired
Helen’s sake: there death’s end enshrouded a part of them.”

Homer’s Odyssey, which precedes Works and Days by a generation, gives
another hint of the debacle through its constant invocation of Agamemnon’s fate
when he returned from Troy to Mycenae and by its main storyline of the
squatters in Odysseus’ palace who have taken advantage of the king’s absence to
make a blatant attempt on his kingdom.
The legend of Idomeneus hints at similar troubles in Crete. In light of the Catastrophe, Homer’s
emphasis on the gluttony and loutish behavior of the suitors acquires a
provocative meaning. The suitors
resemble Hesiod’s fifth men, the phase of humanity to which Hesiod sees himself
as belonging: this is the age inaugurated by the “race of iron.” Envy or resentment, disregard for law
and civilized achievement, and a strong proclivity to violent expropriation of
other men’s chattels constitute the chief traits of the Hesiodic “Iron Age.”

Hesiod says that the
successors to the heroes brought forth a degraded way of life inherently violent and unjust, so much so
that in a prophecy he foresees divine retribution:

Zeus will
destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the
temples at their birth. [Neither
will] the father… agree with his children, nor the children with their father,
nor guest with his host, nor comrade with comrade; nor will brother be dear to
brother as aforetime… They will
not repay their aged parents the cost of their nurture, for might shall be
their right: and one man will sack another’s city… The wicked will hurt the worthy man, speaking false words
against him, and will swear an oath upon them.

Homer’s suitors resemble
the Hesiodic savages closely, being oath-breakers, flouters of custom, and
plotters of assassination, who scheme with criminal invidiousness to
appropriate Odysseus’ wealth and royal authority for their own. Homer, of course, identifies the
suitors not as invaders who have come to Ithaca with a piratical intention but
rather as spoiled sons of local aristocrats, thwarted at home in their
ambitions, who constitute a kind of insurgency. The suitors seek illegitimate upward mobility in the
presumptive widowhood of Penelope and the patent inexperience of Telemachus.

Homer makes it
abundantly, thematically clear that the suitors despise orderly existence,
labeling them with the same pejorative formulas that he applies to the
inarguably primitive Cyclopes, who are actual cave dwellers. The disintegration of the heroic
polities all across the Greek world is what provides the often-invoked backdrop of Odysseus’ adventures. The fate of Troy at the hands of the
Achaean expedition foretells the fate of many a heroic kingdom on its monarch’s
return. Homer thus grasps acutely
that he lives in a time of providential revival. Homer knows that between his own brightening day and the
last sunlit era stretches a prolonged twilight commencing with abrupt
destruction and consisting in fallow centuries. The heroic sagas follow the generations far enough to say
that Orestes avenged the death of Agamemnon and that Odysseus quelled the insurrection in
his palace, but after that they fall silent. No contemporary of Homer tells us about
the reign of Telemachus or that of Nestor’s eldest son. Apollodorus does record, at a late
date, a story that after the events in Odyssey
foreigners indeed descended on Ithaca and drove Odysseus into exile.

II. Hesiod’s characterization of the fifth men as a race
of “iron,” the emblematic metal of moral degradation, signifies a good
deal. In his metallic succession
of ages, the poet had identified the heroes with the metal bronze. Archeologists have long spoken of the
phase of civilization, from about 2000 B.C. down to 1100 B.C., as the Bronze
Age, on account of its primary metallurgical achievement. The Bronze-Age polities were also the
first literate societies, not in a sense of general literacy, but rather of
administrative literacy. The
mastery of elaborate syllabary writing systems by royal bureaucracies made
possible for the first time in history the organization of complex principalities
and even empires, while the bureaucratic character of such regimes perhaps also
limited their adaptability in emergent conditions. As Robert Drews points out in his masterly End of the Bronze Age (1993), a
providential access to iron weaponry endowed on “uncivilized populations that
until that time had been no cause for concern to the cities and kingdoms of the
eastern Mediterranean” a capacity for “a new style of warfare” that the
existing societies never anticipated and could not rally themselves to meet.

Rapidly moving foot
soldiery armed with novel iron swords broke the back of aristocratic
chariot-and-archery armies on every occasion. The tempest of plundering and burning commenced in the
northern areas of Greece, with raids on the tempting granaries and treasuries
of the palace-citadels, around the time that the heroes of Troy undertook to
wend their way home. Drews,
correlating the mass of evidence and the many interpretations, writes, “the Catastrophe
seems to have begun with sporadic destructions in the last quarter of the
thirteenth century [B.C.], gathered momentum in the 1190s, and raged in full
fury in the 1180s.” In its
whirlwind celerity as well as in its incendiary result, Drews reckons the
Catastrophe as “arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more
calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire.”

One glimpses the urgency
of those remote and foreign days in the “Linear B” tablets
recovered from the burnt remains of the Mycenaean palace – identified by
archeologists not without cause as “Nestor’s Palace” –
at Pylos on the west coast of the Peloponnese in the Messenia district. In Odyssey,
Homer records how Telemachus visited Pylos in search of intelligence about his
long-absent father. For Homer,
Nestor’s city represents the ideal of an intact heroic society, at peace with
itself, aware of no external threat, its common people reconciled to the ruler
by his justice and generosity.
Pylos, unlike Mycenae, lacked fortifications. The obvious inference is that its builders and occupiers
never thought it needed any.

Drews argues that
whatever the vices of the Bronze Age societies, whether Greek or Levantine or
Anatolian, they all give abundant evidence of working in proper order until the
last days although there are signs of alarm here and there in the record. For example, in the final decade of the
Thirteenth Century B.C. or in the initial decade of the Twelfth, someone – we
might guess at a consortium of Peloponnesian principalities, with Pylos or
perhaps Mycenae taking the lead – undertook construction of an ambitious
defensive wall across the Isthmus of Corinth. The builders of this Achaean equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall
can only have embarked on the project hastily when they saw an imminent,
potentially lethal menace developing rapidly to the north. The wall, incomplete, failed its
purpose.

At Pylos, shortly before
the enemy sacked and burned the city, the king through his lieutenants busied
himself in issuing abrupt and desperate orders to his field officers. We know this because the scribes wrote
these orders on clay tablets for
later copying in a more “permanent” medium, such as papyrus or vellum. Ordinarily, the janitor threw out the
clay tablets. The conflagration,
however, destroyed the “permanent” records and providentially baked the raw
clay into a form that burial beneath the rubble then fortuitously
preserved. It is a snapshot of the
end.

The best account of these
military orders, as issued in a distraught hour by desperate men, comes from
Leonard Palmer’s invaluable Minoans and
Mycenaeans, published more than forty-five years ago. Palmer considered the geography implied
by the tablets, which direct military commanders to send soldiers and
weapon-makers hurriedly to different locations. Palmer came to the conclusion that the leaders of Pylos
expected attacks from the north, primarily along the shoreline – and therefore
from a ship borne, Viking-like raid – but also over various inland routes. The enemy must have been numerous and
mobile. The Cretan writing system
used by the Mycenaean scribes ill fitted the Greek language, so Palmer, like
every other decipherer of “Linear B,” whether in the case of the Pylos tablets
or others, must tease out much by guesswork. Nevertheless, Palmer can actually identify by name at least two of the line officers,
Echelawon and Lawagetas, whom the inscriptions indicate
as commanders of the coastal and border guards.

Like Crockett and Bouwie
at the Alamo, Echelawon and Lawagetas were doomed heroes. As the crisis loomed, headquarters
exerted itself to send additional oarsmen to a naval station on the Gulf of
Messenia. The defenders, as Palmer
reports, were sufficiently desperate to have ordered votive statuettes of Potniaor
“the Mistress” to be removed from temples and melted down to make weapons. The Pylians much revered this Mycenaean
goddess antecedent to Athene. In Odyssey, Athene figures as the hero’s
divine patroness. She fights
beside Odysseus and Telemachus in their battle against the suitors. Metaphorically Potnia was fighting beside Echelawon and
Lawagetas at Messenia and at the unfinished wall.

It did not go as well in
Pylos a generation after the heroic returns as it went for Odysseus in his
time. The commanders of the Pylian
defense ordered the hasty transfer of soldiers described as “willing to row”
from army to navy postings. To the
“farther provinces” went the foundry workers whose job it would have been to
melt down the images of Potnia for
the casting of arrowheads and javelin points. “Masons” accompanied these smiths. One immediately thinks of fortifications in need of
bolstering or defensive walls in need of repair. The tablets also make reference to women who work as “grain
pourers.” These had been convened en masse in Pylos itself and at Leuktra, a northerly regional settlement,
where they undoubtedly helped to prepare field-rations for the line. “The overall picture of emergency… is
unmistakable,” Palmer writes; “the archive is permeated with this sense
emergency.” Palmer concludes:
“Thus alerted and organized, the Pylians awaited the attack from the sea. The ruin of the palace and the fire
that preserved the archives are eloquent testimony that the attack was
successful. Pylos was blotted from
the face of the earth and its site was never again occupied by human
habitations.”

III. “One man will sack another’s city.” So wrote Hesiod. In a chapter of The End of the Bronze Age entitled “The
Catastrophe Surveyed,” Drews systematically tallies up the wave of early
Twelfth-Century incendiary activity in Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria, the Southern
Levant, Greece, the Aegean, and Crete.
Borrowing a phrase from the German scholar Kurt Bittel, Drews remarks
that, “at every Anatolian site known to have been important in the Late Bronze
Age” one finds a “destruction level” significant of a universal “Brandkatastrophe.”
Thanks to Homer, posterity remembered the Mycenaeans although for a long
time intellectual opinion considered the events of Iliad and Odyssey
to be pure fancy. In the absence
of a Homer, however, the Anatolian victims of the Catastrophe vanished from
memory. The Hittites ran a
formidable empire with monumental cities for three hundred years and were
perhaps the greatest diplomatists of their age, but in classical times no one
remembered them; they emerged from millennia of oblivion only through the
efforts of archeology in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Hattusas, the
capital city of the Hittite Empire, went up in flames shortly after the
destruction of Troy VI, which the Hittites knew under a double name as the
kingdom of Taruisa-Wilusa (Troy-Ilios). The last effective Hittite king, Suppiluliumas
II, had actually helped his Syrian and Cypriote allies vanquish a pirate
flotilla, with its embarked marine soldiery, near Cyprus, swiftly raising his
own navy for the purpose. This sea
battle signified the military last hurrah
of the once formidable Hittite empire.
With his northern trade routes already cut by the disaster at Troy and
his attention drawn to the south, Suppiluliumas could not overcome powerful
pressure from an age-old barbarian enemy, the Gasga or Kaskians. It was not only Hattusas that collapsed
amidst fire and smoke, as Drews says, but also the cities at Alaka Höyük,
Alishar, Maşat Höyük, and Karaoglan, whose old names vanished with their
inhabitants so that we must nowadays identify them by the nomenclature of
Turkish geography. Milawanda (classical
Miletus), where Achaean colonists maintained a trading polity under Hittite
license, also perished in the general rout.

The architects of the
Cypriote cities built according to a sophisticated aesthetic, influenced by the
old Cretan civilization. These
exquisite towns met their death at just about the same time as the Anatolian
cities met theirs. At one Cypriote
site, the fleeing citizens hid their valuables in cubbyholes, imagining that
they might soon return. Cyprus,
like Attica, evidences a modicum of cultural continuity in the aftermath of the
Catastrophe. The new style
compares with the old, however, in an impoverished way. The people resettle not so much in the
old places as in difficult-to-reach mountain fastnesses. The new architecture is – defensive. Refugees from the Peloponnese certainly arrived in Cyprus
following the destruction in their homeland. A form of “Linear B,” the Eteo-Cypriote
Syllabary, remained in use among the Cypriote Greeks, who spoke an
Achaean-derived Ionian dialect, well into historical times.

In
the Levant, the best-attested site of the Catastrophe is ancient Ugarit (now Ras
Shamra in Syria), a wealthy and culturally sophisticated Bronze Age city, with
an attendant petty empire. Ugarit
derived its prosperity from its middleman position in the Eastern Mediterranean
trading economy; the kingdom could make war but it preferred to make treaties
of exchange. As at Pylos, the
onslaught accidentally preserved written documentation of the final panic. In Drews’ words, “when Ugarit was
destroyed some hundred tablets were being baked in the oven, and so we have
documents written on the very eve of its destruction.” Hammurapi, the Ugaritic king, reported
on the news to his ally the king of Alashia (Cyprus). His words register his sense of shock and helplessness:
“Behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities (?) were burned, and they did
evil things in my country.” Manuel
Robbins, in his Collapse of the Bronze Age
(2001), quotes Hammurapi’s letter of appeal to the Hittite king, not yet driven
down but already in dire straits on his own. Says Ugarit: “The enemy advances against me and there is no
number… our number is… send whatever is available, look to it and send it to
me.”

The phrase “no number”means numberless
or innumerable. The image of a multitudinous swarm or horde
represents the Catastrophe essentially. But the Hittite king – it might be Suppiluliumas II
although it might also be Arnuwanda, his obscure successor – had already
written to Hammurapi requesting grain by urgent transport to offset the effects
of a devastating famine. This food
shortage might have stemmed from tentative depredations in the northern
provinces of Hatti (the Hittites’ name for their country), or social collapse
driven by crop-failure might have signaled to a piratical conscience that
plundering raids could safely commence.
“Look, lads – the guard is down,”
as some cunning brigand might have said.
With Hatti already embroiled, no aid came. Ugarit died. A
large number of arrowheads excavated from its ruins suggest to Robbins a
systematic slaughter of those inhabitants who could not escape. In addition to Ugarit, the cities of
Alalakh, Hamath, Qatna, and Qadesh also fell to “the hordes” (Hammurapi’s
phrase) that launched themselves on the Levant.

IV. In the east, Assyria proved a bulwark against the
tide. In the south, Egypt likewise
held out, in its qualified way.
Pharaoh Ramesses III erected stelae
celebrating his victory over “the Sea Peoples” who poured into the Nile delta
in the 1180s. Yet as Drews and
Robbins and many other commentators have pointed out, the defeat of the
invaders, while it prevented the destruction of the New Kingdom, portended the
stultification of Egyptian culture and the end of Egypt’s role as an
international power. From the
Eleventh Century B.C. onwards the Pharaohs largely minded their own business
until first the Persians and then the Macedonians incorporated them. That aside, the victory stelae provide useful information about
the identity of the mischief-makers.
Among the identifiable ethnic components of this marauding conglomerate,
the Egyptian scribes listed (following Drews’ summary) Ekwesh, Denyen, Lukka, Shardana, Shekelesh,Tjekker, Tursha, and Weshesh. According to the scribes, these mixed peoples came from “the
islands” or “the coastal lands.”

Some of these names
retain meaning for modern researchers.
The Ekwesh and Denyen, for example, are probably Achaeans
and Danaans – that is Greeks, dubbing themselves, as they do in Homer. The Lukka
are Lycians, an Anatolian people who lived more or less at peace with the
Hittites as allies or vassals; they were still a nation in classical
times. The Shardana, Shekelesh, and Tursha adorn the roster somewhat
unexpectedly. The first two names
have connections with Sardinia and Sicily, but the evidence cannot tell us
whether they came from those places bearing the name of their origin or went on
to them subsequently to christen them.
The Tursha are the
Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, a people associated with Italy. Again, it remains unclear whether they
came from Italy or went on to that place.
The Tjekker are hill
tribes from the Levantine interior.
The name Weshesh might be
a variant, hence also a duplicate, of Ekwesh. Why are these exotic philological
matters important?

These items of linguistic
esoterica warrant attention
because they bring up the problem of catastrophic agency. Archeologists and historians have known
about the Catastrophe for a century although their sense of it has become more
acute in the last fifty years.
Several theories have arisen to explain the near-universality of the
Catastrophe in its region. The
earliest and in some ways the most tenacious is the Migration Theory. This theory posits that a single
ethnically uniform people, reaching a point of crowded numbers in their Balkan
homeland and arming themselves with novel iron swords, poured into Greece and
then into the Aegean; they would also have crossed the Bosporus into Asia Minor
where they continued their rampage, driving all before them. In a kind of domino process, they
displaced others, some of whom joined them in the train of rapine and arson
until the madness spent itself in Egyptian sands. Various minor sequelae
to this Völkerwanderung account for the redistribution of old
nationalities, the disappearance of others, and the appearance of novel
nationalities that differentiate one end of the catastrophic epoch from the
other.

The first two names have connections with Sardinia and Sicily, but the evidence cannot tell us whether they came from those places bearing the name of their origin or went on to them subsequently to christen them. The Tursha are the Tyrrhenians or Etruscans, a people associated with Italy. Again, it remains unclear whether they came from Italy or went on to that place. Rent a car Namibia

It was impossible to wage the sort of ethnic cleansing and genocide envisaged by the "Migration Theory". Moreover, the military conquests in the region are highly documented, including those before the so-called "Catastrophe". Essentially, this theory asks us to believe that the most severe of the region's deluges went unrecorded.

I make a distinction between military conquest on the one hand, and ethnic cleansing/genocide on the other, as one might differentiate between Napoleon and Hitler, respectively.

Lastly, the Migration Period is an extrapolation of the Völkerwanderung, which is in the main misunderstood and utterly incongruous with catastrophe as we would understand it today.

"Modern people assume the immunity of their situation to major disturbance or – even more unthinkable – to terminal wreckage."

On the contrary, every generation assumes that they, their time and their space are exceptional. Often, they are convinced that their society is in decline and that disaster is imminent.

"...the assumption of social permanence, that tomorrow will necessarily be just like today, can, when it becomes too habitual through lack of reflection, lead to dangerous complacency."

Arguably Western societies are excessively reflective today, due to the strong sense of self-importance noted above. Historical data is repeatedly re-analyzed and re-constructed, and more than ever before the West is preparing for the future.

"Archeologists and historians have known about the Catastrophe for a century although their sense of it has become more acute in the last fifty years. Several theories have arisen to explain the near-universality of the Catastrophe in its region."

Deluges, especially floods, are staples of mythologies and figure prominently in early recorded histories. They figure as prominently in the ancient cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean as in those of the Americas and the Orient. Given the inaccuracy and exagerration of myths and early histories, "the Catastrophe" may be an inappropriate title. Have the "Dark Ages" not been rehabilitated? Are the Northumbrian and Carolingian revivals of learning, and glossators not seen today as essential precursors to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment?

"The earliest and in some ways the most tenacious is the Migration Theory. This theory posits that a single ethnically uniform people, reaching a point of crowded numbers in their Balkan homeland and arming themselves with novel iron swords, poured into Greece and then into the Aegean; they would also have crossed the Bosporus into Asia Minor where they continued their rampage, driving all before them. In a kind of domino process, they displaced others, some of whom joined them in the train of rapine and arson until the madness spent itself in Egyptian sands. Various minor sequelae to this Völkerwanderung account for the redistribution of old nationalities, the disappearance of others, and the appearance of novel nationalities that differentiate one end of the catastrophic epoch from the other."

Unfortunately, this explanation does not work, as the Migration Period was very gradual and over centuries, occurring at a glacial speed when compared to post-war migration from the Third World to the West. Before the Huns destabilized the Roman Empire, Germanic mercenaries predominated in Rome's legions and foederati secured her borders. The Empire was multi-ethnic, even if it assimilated foreign peoples it absorbed or conquered.

Moreover, it is inconceivable that a military force could have laid waste to Greece and the Near East, given the costly attrition rate expected from sacking city after city. Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans engaged in the scale of ethnic cleansing suggested by the "Migration Theory", and the endemic warfare of the region foiled all attempts at conquest. Even the Muslim expansion into the Levant and Anatolia provoked a Western backlash that endured for centuries. In conclusion, the region was too difficult to ravage in the manner suggested, much less by an unknown people, especially as the would-be masters of the Near East are well known.

Andre: I'm not quite clear. Are you saying that this area was too difficult to ravage given its historical particularities or that conquests of this claimed scope are impossible in general? The Spanish conquest of Central America comes to my mind as one comparable example.

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